The Nuts

I've been enjoying the World Series of Poker, which is filmed, edited, and shown by ESPN long after the tournament is over and print media have already named the winner, but fortunately the amateurs who won the last five years have been faceless enough (at least before the tournament) that I don't remember who won. I know watching people play cards sounds like the most boring thing on earth to most people, but the point is the bizarre characters who populate this subculture.

I was really pulling for one of a few people to win, like either Maria Ho, the woman who went the deepest into the tournament, or Scottie Nguyen, the former champ and Vietnamese immigrant whose peculiar grasp of the English language requires that he punctuate ever sentence with “baby”, like in his most famous line, “You call it's gonna be all over, baby.” I was also rooting for the Italian kid Dario Minieri who took an early chip lead looking all cute and cherubic in a burgundy and orange scarf that had everybody calling him Harry Potter... it was Roma he was supporting, not Gryffindor, but a man wearing a scarf indoors is still like wearing a button that says, “Yes! I am Eurotrash... ask me about a single currency and my latent homosexuality.” Mainly I was rooting for Dario because he actually won a porsche gambling online but doesn't have a driver's license, and this unused machine was annoying the hell out of everybody who sat down at his table.

There's usually at least a few bizarre events involving these characters that make it all memorable, and really just because I wanted to see how well the embedded video worked, I thought I'd show you one. In Texas Hold'em, the expression “the nuts” refers to the particular combination of hole cards that is unbeatable given the cards on the table... for instance if there are four hearts on the table a player with the ace of hearts holds the best possible flush, the “nut flush” in fact. So they don't appear often, but when they do, it's a cause for great joy and great anguish, as seen here.

When Stereotypes Collide

Sometimes there's a strange positive interactive effect to national and ethnic stereotypes, which I just saw at work in the World Series of Poker. German student George Danzer, standing out in a dashing suit with a red shirt and a scarf that only a German could make masculine (so nobody sees him swallow hard when he's bluffing), was facing a puzzling pre-flop raise and re-raise from Dimitri Nobles. So he cracked a grin and asked with mock earnestness, "Are you from Scandinavia?", invoking the stereotype of Scandinavians as very loose with their chips. With at least $200,000 on the table, Danzer was holding aces so he went all in, upon which Nobles, bluff and bravado both exposed, sheepishly mucked his cards as Danzer assured him, "You are from Scandinavia, you re-raise with nothing and then have to fold."

Here's the thing... Dimitri Nobles is not from Scandinavia, he's from America. And he's black. I'm not saying George Danzer said anything wrong, but that really could have gone over badly, if Nobles thought Danzer was making an ironic comment on his skin color by asking if he was Scandinavian. The whole Nazi thing does add another twinge to racism by Germans, so that wouldn't help either. Fortunately, Nobles is American, so another stereotype came into play. Nobles' response, delivered with a broad American smile, was "Scandinavia? I don't even know where that is, man."